


in a pinch of salt

by sullypants



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Neighbors, F/M, fridge fic, or so i've been calling it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:07:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25096603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sullypants/pseuds/sullypants
Summary: Betty's fridge bites the dust, and she finds herself accepting some help from her moody neighbor.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 62
Kudos: 177
Collections: 8th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	in a pinch of salt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Raptorlily (raptorlilian)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raptorlilian/gifts).



> For raptor—kind, thoughtful, very generous; and who also dealt with a broken fridge recently.

It’s not a great scenario.

The ink on her lease is hardly dry, she’s only been in this apartment for four days, and now her refrigerator ( _not_ an avocado green to match the oven, thankfully—but still, it’s likely as old as she is) appears to have bitten the dust.

Betty is not a damsel. What’s more, she _knows_ mechanics. She’d been able to dismantle and rebuild a car engine before she even started junior high. She has a dual Bachelors in systems engineering and English literature. In high school, she designed locks as a form of stress management.

But this fridge might defeat her. 

.

After two hours, she calls it. 

She’s maneuvered the fridge away from the wall, dug her headlamp out from one of many yet-to-be-unpacked boxes, done some quick YouTube searches and Googling, and _then_ dived even deeper into the a digital archive of appliance user manuals that appears to date back no earlier than 1987—impressive, but not enough.

.

Calling her landlord goes exactly as expected.

Betty hopes that Penny—who, as a lawyer, and thus a fellow woman who’d come up in male-dominated industries—will have some trust in Betty’s handywoman credentials.

Betty is already stressed with the move, and she has to get back to work in less than two days; she does not want to go through the charade of waiting for a repairman to investigate and come to the same conclusion to which she’s already arrived—the fridge cannot be fixed; it needs replacing. 

.

The call does not go well.

.

Penny hangs up and Betty can barely keep an instinctual and angry “fuck!” to a low decibel, so enraged does she feel. 

This new fridge isn’t going to arrive any sooner than _two weeks_ from now, despite her arguments, despite the fact that she invoked the literal law of the state (“The landlord does not have to provide a refrigerator. If a refrigerator is provided, however, the landlord must keep it in working order.”)

(For a brief moment, she considers consulting Veronica—but her best friend is prepping for the bar exam, and Betty doesn’t want to bother her with such small potatoes.) 

She squeezes her eyes shut and feels her hands roll into fists; they clench, but her nails are short. There’s no damage done, and the relief she feels when she untenses her muscles isn’t huge—but it’s also not nothing.

She’s so focused on going through the check-list of her coping mechanisms in order to deal with this anger and frustration pulsing in her head, that Mr. Moody-Neighbor sneaks up on her completely.

He’s not wearing the hat, but he’s in jeans and a white t-shirt, and what appear to be a very threadbare pair of white socks. There’s a black trash bag hanging from his hand, and that’s when Betty realizes she’s blocking the door to the trash and recycling room.

“Oh! I’m sorry, excuse me,'' she jumps back from the door and bends ever-so-slightly at the waist, waving her hands (now open) in an _all yours_ gesture at the door. 

Moody-Neighbor frowns. 

“Are you alright?”

Betty’s first instinct is to placate, to exclaim, “Oh, of course, everything is fine, I have this handled,” but she doesn’t. 

Instead, she exhales, places her hands on her hips, and tells him.

“Penny.”

Betty needs merely to mention their landlord’s name before Moody-Neighbor raises his own hand in a placating gesture.

“Say no more: she’s not very helpful. I’m sorry. Didn’t you just move in?” She nods, and he shakes his head. “You think she’d wait at least a week before letting you down.”

Betty shrugs.

“It’s…,” she begins lamely. It’s not; it’s _not_ fine. On the day she’d moved into this apartment—this apartment in which she’d be living alone for the first time, where she was the only person named on the lease, this measure of independence that she’s sought for so long and only _just_ achieved—she’d done a full, proper, _extensive_ grocery-shop.

She’d even paid for a cab home, she’d had so many bags. Her pantry, her cabinets, her fridge—her first solo kitchen, a room entirely of her own—was fully stocked. She could cook and bake and experiment and feed herself to her heart’s whim, without fear that she might wake a roommate by making midnight ramen, or feel the burn of her mother’s stare on her back for “indulging _”_ too frequently in her own baked goods. 

And now her fridge is broken, and she has no recourse but to wave goodbye to more than a hundred dollars worth of good and perishable food.

_What a waste._

She shares this with Moody-Neighbor—if perhaps in not so many words—and he asks, “Oh, that’s it?”

Betty feels a flash of annoyance, but Moody-Neighbor continues.

“Would you like to store stuff in my fridge for now?”

.

This is how Betty comes to find herself utilizing Jughead Jones’s hospitality, in the form of his refrigerator space.

(She’s a little surprised that his name is in reality hardly less odd than the nickname she’d given him in her head, but she’s able to utilize her lifelong training as a Cooper, and refrains from letting her confusion play transparently across her face.

She hopes.)

His fridge is almost completely empty, save for a few cartons of what looks like leftover Thai takeout, and a half-gallon of whole milk.

(After they make the first trip from her apartment to his, arms laden with bushy kale greens and plump tomatoes, tubs of ricotta and wedges of pecorino, Jughead pulls this half-gallon from the fridge, sniffing it tentatively before turning on the faucet of the kitchen sink and pouring it down the drain.)

It takes them two and half trips to move the contents of her fridge into his, and another half to transfer the stuff in her freezer.

“You can keep them in there,” he tilts his head thoughtfully, “for however long it takes Penny to get you a new fridge?” His inflection is questioning, and it makes Betty laugh.

She’s surprised; she hadn’t noticed the frustration she had felt not long ago ebbing. 

But Jughead “Moody-Neighbor” Jones’s eyes crinkle at the corners when he smiles, and Betty feels oddly delighted by this fact. 

.

She’s not sure how to navigate accessing her own food, but it turns out Jughead Jones works from home and is usually around.

He’s a freelance writer, he tells Betty. “Mostly book and movie reviews, but some other stuff, where I can find it.”

“Have you read or seen anything good recently?”

“Nope,” he says shortly, and Betty freezes slightly in the act of putting a carton of heavy cream on the second shelf.

“Well—that’s harsh. I usually end up with the bottom of the barrel stuff. I did get to read Ben Lerner’s new book for a review a few months ago,” he caveats.

“Oh, _The Topeka School_?”

If Jughead is surprised she knows this, he hides it, and shares his thoughts on the new book with her, handing her a bag of apples, a carton of spinach, and some fennel one-by-one for her to place into his refrigerator. 

When they’re done, she puts her hands on her hips and breathes deeply, exhales loudly.

“I really appreciate this, Jughead,” she begins, only for Moody-Neighbor—Jughead—to physically wave away her repeated thanks with his hand. 

“It’s not a problem at all, really. I’m sorry you have to deal with this.”

.

Betty tries to make judicious decisions as to how she can plan out her meals in such a way as to bother Jughead Jones as little as possible.

When she gains access to his fridge for her dinner supplies, she also pulls certain items for her breakfast—a yogurt, some bacon, a little half-and-half for coffee—that she keeps on ice in a little cooler, recently purchased, that sits on her kitchen counter. 

Still—when she forgets the eggs one day, and finds herself torn over knocking on his door at eight in the morning, she ultimately lets herself just do it—regrets be damned.

The door swings open after a short wait to reveal Jughead in a pair of plaid boxers and a worn gray t-shirt. His hair stands at odd angles and his eyes squint at her in sleepiness.

“Oh, I’m _so_ sorry, I forgot the eggs for breakfast, I apologize, I didn’t know if you’d be awake or not yet because I know you work freelance, I’m so, so sorry—”

But Jughead cuts her off with a wave, and his hand moves to gesture her into his apartment. 

She whispers her thanks, and practically tip-toes to his fridge, where she grabs two eggs, and another stick of butter for good measure—just in case. 

She turns around to find him pressing the on-switch of drip-coffee maker. 

“I’m sorry again for waking you—” she starts, but again Jughead waves her off.

“It’s not a problem,” he tells her. “Would you like a cup?”

Betty hasn’t made her own coffee yet this morning; for a moment she hesitates. Her instinct is to decline, thinking it’d be a burden—but then she hears herself saying, “That’d be great.”

Jughead pours her a mug, and Betty brings it back to her apartment, sipping it slowly as her eggs cook on her stovetop. It's strong, but delicious. 

.

Her new fridge arrives in a mere twelve days—two less than anticipated.

The delivery men are waiting by the building entrance by the time she arrives from a foreshortened day at the office, and within the hour her new fridge is in place and plugged in.

.

Jughead, very kindly and against protests that _she can handle it, he_ must _have work to do_ , helps her move any remaining groceries from his fridge back into her own. 

When they’re finished, Betty regards her new refrigerator, still covered in the protective plastic from the factory. 

She closes the door and turns to Jughead, ready to thank him again, but he cuts her off like he already knows what she’s about to say.

“I’m glad you have a new fridge; and honest—it was no problem at all. I was happy to help,” he smiles at her; it’s a slight thing, and Betty wonders if she’s ever seen him smile so widely before now. She can’t remember.

“Also, you seem like _much_ more of a chef than me, and I can only respect that as a person who loves to eat.”

.

“Jesus, that’s huge.”

She nods. “I usually freeze half of it, it can last a couple weeks.” She considers him for a moment as she hands him the ceramic dish. “Maybe a little less for you.”

She won’t let Jughead’s generosity toward her go unappreciated—it’s against all her instincts as both a person _and_ a Cooper. So she says thank you in the most familiar way she knows—food. In this instance, lasagna. 

“Ha—whoa this is heavy.” The ceramic dish falls into his arms and he turns, walking back toward his kitchen.

Betty thinks standing in the hallway and waiting for him to return might be a little stupid at this point, since she’s been in-and-out of his apartment so frequently in the past fortnight—so she closes the door and follows. 

Jughead already has a knife in the lasagna, doling out two generous slices onto plates.

“Oh, no, no,” Betty protests, “I made it for you.”

But Jughead merely holds a fork out to her without a word. When he raises his eyebrows, she finally concedes and takes it from him. 

.

  
  


“Do you only eat takeout?” 

It’s not the first time she’s entered her building after work, only to find him greeting a delivery person at the building’s front door. 

She holds the elevator for him as he tips the delivery guy, and he does a cute little hustle to get to the elevator once he realizes she’s waiting for him.

She realizes only after she asks that this is possibly too rude of a question. This happens sometimes. When she was a teenager, and living under her mother’s watchful eye, she had much more control over what she said in company. It was only after four years away at college and several more in the working world that Betty realized she’d been biting her tongue for too long, and too much to her detriment.

She’s still figuring out the balance. 

But Jughead doesn’t seem offended; he merely shrugs. “I made that lasagna last as long as I could. There’s some things I can cook, but I also know that man can not survive on burgers alone.” He shakes the paper bag in his hand. “I gotta get some greens so I don’t die at thirty.”

The elevator continues its slow ascent. This thing is rickety; Betty typically takes the stairs, even though it’s eight flights. 

The words come out of her mouth before she’s even realized what they are. Why does that keep happening, she wonders.

“Do you want to learn? I mean—” At this point, her brain has begun to catch up with her. “I like cooking. It can be pretty meditative. Baking, too.” She bites her lip but quickly realizes how that might look, and stops. “If you’re interested?”

He’s looking at her with wide-eyes and suddenly she feels a bit like an idiot—why would her _neighbor_ , this _guy_ , want to spend any extra time with her? But before she can sink into this thought spiral—

“Sure,” he says. “That could be fun.”

.

They start small. 

“I love breakfast for dinner.” He leans over her shoulder and watches as she twirls a spatula around the edges of the bright yellow egg mixture that coats the pan. 

“Right? It’s so simple. Occasionally when my parents would be stuck on a story—oh: they ran the local newspaper,” Jughead nods for her to continue, “Polly and Charles—those are my older siblings,” he nods yet again, “and I would all make breakfast-for-dinner for ourselves. We were little—well, _I_ was little, Chuck and Poll were probably like ten or twelve, fourteen.” 

She places the spatula on a plate that sits next to the stovetop for this very purpose, and turns slightly to face Jughead in such a way that she can keep half an eye on the omelet as it cooks.

“You love them,” Jughead says, and Betty realizes she’s smiling. 

Nodding, she agrees. “I do. They’re important to me.”

“I have a little sister. Jellybean. She’s eighteen now, she’s kind of a terror—always has been a terror—but she’s my sister.” 

Jughead moves to the drawer where he stores his cutlery (Betty notices it’s half stainless steel, half plastic utensils he’s clearly gotten for free from his takeout orders and never utilized), but she keeps silent. 

If she stays silent, maybe he’ll say more. Moody-Neighbor had become Neighbor-Jughead, but this felt like something more than mere casual, neighborly conversation. Maybe he was becoming Friend-Jughead, or… _Whatever_ -Jughead. 

She shakes her head of these thoughts, and moves to plate their first omelet. He doesn't mention his sister any further.

She flips it perfectly onto the plate Jughead proffers toward her with two hands, and feels her cheeks flush with pride at his groan of approval. She smiles.

“Do you want to have a go at making one?”

.

"It’s very important to properly salt your water.”

She takes a generous pinch from the small bowl of kosher salt she’s brought from across the hall, tosses it into the boiling water in the saucepan.

“You want it to taste like the sea.”

He nods and leans over the pot. 

“Why not put it in before you boil it?” he asks her.

“That’ll ruin your pots; I’ve done that.”

.

By their third cooking lesson, Betty finally heeds Jughead’s very casual invitation to simply walk right into his apartment.

They’ve made omelets, cacio e pepe, chicken Kiev. 

They’re _scheduled_ to meet. He knows she’s coming. It’s taken her weeks to get to the point where she thinks, _okay, yes: walk into his apartment without knocking, it’s no big deal_ , against all the instincts Alice Cooper drilled into her as a young person. 

This confidence drains quickly once she enters his living room and attempts to keep from dropping the bag of fresh kale she carries at the sight of him, dressed only in boxers and seemingly drenched in sweat, attempting to tinker with what Betty assumes to be a broken air conditioner. 

She instantly breaks out into a sweat of her own—his apartment is _boiling_ and _humid_ —and thanks god for it, as this is what conceals the instantaneous flush of red she feels in her cheeks at the sight of him. 

He looks at her in exasperation (and what Betty might label the slightest hint of embarrassment—it’s hard to tell since the room is so warm), crying, “I’m fucked. Sorry for swearing, but this is miserable.”

She sort of agrees. It’s kind of difficult not to look at his naked shoulders. He stands up from the floor near the window where he’s dragged the unit from the window. _Is he usually this tall? Does he slouch? When did his shoulders get so broad?_

_Damn_ , she thinks, but out loud she blurts, “I can fix it.”

Jughead’s eyebrows crinkle together.

“I can fix it. I’m handy,” she tells him. “I once built a car.”

One of his eyebrows raises itself toward his hairline. 

“But you couldn’t fix your fridge?”

She scoffs, and in her indignation momentarily forgets herself. “Some things are _actually_ broken and need to be replaced. But that doesn’t look old—I assume you bought it within the last couple years?” He nods. “Okay, yeah, I can absolutely fix it.”

.

“That seems a little more than handy, Betty.”

He eyes the window where the air conditioner sits, holds his hand to feel the cool air now emanating from within it.

She wipes her hands with a towel, and can’t really suppress the smile she feels pulling at her cheeks. 

.

They shop for groceries together.

She shows him how to pick the perfect, in-season, heirloom tomato; how to buy and shuck oysters; the exact shade of green a banana should be at purchase to ensure ideal ripeness within the week.

.

  
  


She thinks they’ve reached a point where he might be able to handle the lasagna recipe she’d made him.

She’s of two minds on the idea. 

This project gives her an excuse to spend time with Jughead. Occasionally they use her kitchen, more often his.

(She likes working in his apartment so that she might have the opportunity to take stock of his supplies and resources, and decide—depending on the recipe—if they should work with the artificial boundaries of what he already owns, or instead convince him to invest in a cheap starter item for his kitchen. So far, under her influence, he now owns a four-quart casserole dish with extra-tall sides, a hand mixer, an eight-inch chef’s knife, and _two_ baking sheets. She’s inordinately proud of this.)

On the other—the more he learns, the better he gets, the more independent he becomes, she presumes. Eventually he’ll have a stable of regular recipes he can pull from, and he’ll no longer need her advice and guidance. He’ll be able to tell when a recipe is under-salted; he’ll know if a pork chop is cooked-through by eyeballing it. 

It’s not enough to get Betty to slow down, however. This isn’t about _her_. Jughead did her a favor, and now she’s returning it by sharing skills and knowledge she already possesses. 

She can’t let herself get hung up on the fact that she likes spending time with him. It wouldn’t do to be selfish. 

.

The lasagna takes them four hours. 

Typically it takes Betty two or so hours to make this recipe, but she finds herself getting a bit lost in conversation with Jughead.

They talk about the book review he’s writing; she tells him about the Alice Munro collection she’s just finished. She talks about her previous job, her current job, and what she might want to do next. He even tells her a little about the novel he’s been working on since he was sixteen.

The lasagna comes out wonderfully. They let it rest for another hour (they discuss his recent rewatch of _The Sopranos_ ), before divvying it up into individual slices.

Two go onto plates, half the lasagna goes into the freezer, and the rest into the fridge.

Jughead pulls a bottle of white wine out of the fridge, one she hadn’t noticed he had in there, and raises his eyebrows in question. She nods, and he pours them each a glass.

It’s a delicious meal. They eat in silence, and Betty feels content.

.

“I guess I should ask _you_ how to properly cook a burger. Now that it's cookout season.” 

The weather is still hot at six pm, and she can see it rise off the concrete of the sidewalks in waves, distorting the air.

It'd been the one thing he claimed he knew best how to make. He _almost_ bragged about it—if Jughead were a person who boasted. 

He laughs at her, and holds the lobby door open to let her pass through it. At the elevator he turns to her. 

“That’s a good idea. How about Saturday?”

.

On Saturday, in the late afternoon, she hears a knock at her door.

Jughead is empty-handed, but wearing an apron covered in a print of cartoon stegosauruses.

She leans against the edge of her door and regards him in amusement. 

“Have you been hiding that?”

He rolls his eyes, but he doesn't appear truly annoyed. “It was a gift from JB. Meet me on the roof when you’re ready.” He turns to walk back down the hall toward the stairwell, and Betty leans out of her door frame and calls after him.

“How do you even get up there? Is that even allowed?” She just moved, and doesn’t want to be evicted anytime soon. 

Jughead barely turns around to respond, waving her worries away with a gesture. 

“It’s fine—just take the stairs all the way up.”

.

She takes the stairs all the way up, only to find a narrow ladder leading to an open trapdoor.

Her head emerges into the sunlight and she squints. 

When her eyes adjust to the late afternoon light, she scans and spots Jughead—standing over a grill, beside which stands a small portable prep table, and nearby a very _non_ -portable wooden picnic table. They clearly are not the first to have taken advantage of the view.

The noise of her shoes over the pebbles that cover the roof alert him to her presence, and he spins to greet her, metal spatula in hand. 

“Oh good, you’re here. Perfect timing, first servings are up.”

As Betty moves to stand next to him, she sees the grill is arrayed with a number of burger patties, all in different states of completion. There’s traditional beef, but also turkey burgers, and even what looks like several veggie patties.

“Vegetarian?” she asks him, surprised. From their weeks of cooking together, she’s come to know Jughead as an avowed carnivore. He’d once teased her about some vegan cheese she’d bought.

“JB’s favorite. I’m not _opposed_ to them,” he shrugs. “I just didn’t know what your favorite was.”

Betty feels the wave of affection in her chest surge; it rises. Her heart seems like it could nearly overflow, and her eyes move from the burgers on the grill to Jughead’s face peering down at her.

She hesitates, and then instantly chides herself for it. _Why not_ , she thinks. Sure, he’s her neighbor—but she’s already seen him nearly naked; at this point, what really is there to lose?

She puts her hands on his shoulders, eyes the grill to make sure none of the patties are liable to burn, and pulls him down to kiss her.

.

When she finally pulls back—she’d lost track of time for a moment there—she realizes she’d unconsciously pulled her torso flush to his; her hands are wrapped around the back of his neck, and she can feel the curls that peek out from beneath the brim of his cute little hat at her fingertips. 

When she opens her eyes, he’s watching her, and there’s the subtlest hint of red across the top of his cheekbones.

“It’s only a veggie burger,” he says, so clearly pleased that Betty feels yet another wave of affection toward him—at this rate her heart might burst. On tiptoes she briefly presses her lips against his once more. 

“But I _did_ also get gluten-free hot dogs—so. If you’re excited by that, too, I wouldn’t argue with you.”

Her cheeks feel sore from smiling, and her stomach rumbles in hunger.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> It ended up sweet, when I intended it to lean humorous—but that's the way the cookie crumbles.
> 
> Properly it should be titled _in a pinch (of salt)_ but a title with parenthesis just doesn’t seem my style, I truly don’t know why.


End file.
